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Suburban Mayhem
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 Suburban Mayhem Production NotesTagline: There are some things in life you can't control.
Why does a 19-year-old girl plot to kill her own father?
Katrina Skinner is stuck in suburbia with her toddler daughter and her devoted dad. Her brother Danny is in jail for life for murder. Her mother abandoned her years ago. The neighbours are scared of her. The police can't keep up with her. Nobody can control her but everybody's trying. Her dad won't mind his own business...
Katrina misses her brother. She needs money for his appeal. She's bored and she's sick of living at home. She's not going to work a day in her life and she knows her dad wants to stop helping her financially. She's first in line for the family inheritance. All she needs to do now is convince one of her lovers to do the deed and she's never had much trouble getting men to do what she wants. All for the love of her brother.
The film opens with the funeral of John Skinner, inside the Golden Grove Crematorium. Kat sits on the front pew between her cheeky fiancé Rusty and her toddler daughter Bailee. Her mobile phone interrupts the service when she receives a text message. Her family glares at her as she reads it... WANNA FUCK? She giggles, and suddenly we are thrust into Katrina's world: youth culture, crime, sex and suburban mayhem.
The story is told from many perspectives: a kaleidoscope of flashbacks and testimonies fuelled by small town gossip, the police, friends and family, her fiancé and her many lovers. It seems everybody has a "story" to tell about Katrina Skinner. Their stories don't add up, but they all take us to the same place...
After hearing the screams of her father in the next room Kat knew it was over. Finally!
No-one would believe that she could do it, and now that it was done she couldn't believe how easy it was... She closed the door to John's room, put a Mr Squiggle video on for her little daughter then joined the killer in the kitchen for a glass of milk and a cigarette.
A girl without conscience, a world without morals. A family destroyed and a daughter getting away with murder.
"I knew the grandmother, she was mad - I knew the mother, she was madder. It's genetics I reckon, that's the only thing I can come up with. You can't get clean water from a dirty tank."
Director's Statement
One day, just a few years ago, a very close friend of mine, Alice Bell, unexpectedly asked me to read her film script.
I remember taking it home. I had no idea what it was about.
I remember reading and re-reading the first couple of pages, getting my bearings. And then suddenly I was launched on this crazy, scary roller-coaster ride. Humorous and harrowing by turns, Katrina jumped off the page like a wild animal. I found her seductive and terrifying. The storytelling was compelling, the script boldly visual, the dialogue fresh and authentic - wickedly funny, raw and brutal.
Katrina seemed unique, the script was already well developed: original, iconoclastic and uncompromising.
For a few hours afterwards my head was spinning. I could see it and hear it. I wanted to make this film.
I loved this strong, transgressive female character who tears up the rule book, trashing the suburban streets of my childhood (our great Australian heartland), trashing all those phoney, sentimental, oppressive family values everyone is trying to peddle us.
In a world where so many things have stopped making sense, here was a character who takes control and then pushes everything and everyone to the limit.
She's manipulative, predatory and volatile. Katrina's a bully with a monstrous sense of entitlement - she feels she's entitled to everything she desires. The perfect poster-girl for these raunchy, reactionary, mean times of ours - for our psychopathic society. She's a lawless child-woman taking revenge on the world that created her.
Katrina breaks all the rules and reminds us just how tenuous and fragile those rules governing society and "civilised" behaviour really are. She reminds us that chaos and anarchy, murder and mayhem really do lurk just below the surface.
Katrina unleashes her furies upon the world, even those she loves. A vortex of anger and vengeance, an emotional terrorist. So now you know that I wanted to make a film that was provocative and troubling. And hopefully, beguilingly subversive. Reading Alice's script had set my imagination reeling. And the next two years spent developing it with her, Leah and Jan were very intense. Then we began casting.
Of course, casting Katrina was the biggest challenge. She is the lynch pin, the film's core. The film would rely almost entirely upon that performance. It needed to be audacious and raw. Darkly cruel and savagely comic, full of bravado. But never, not once, self-conscious or self-censoring. I wanted to find a young actress that would commit herself to Katrina, love her and inhabit the role, demand to make it her own.
Our actress needed to be able to encompass a Katrina who is sexy and fatally charming: a spoilt young woman gone murderously berserk and an immature child crying out for someone to love her.
An actress with no fear, who would test me. I wanted her to push and dare us all. We didn't know if she was out there. So we began searching. And after many months, and after torturously re-calling her many times, I asked Emily Barclay to take on Katrina. At the outset we agreed to ground her performance in emotional truthfulness. It would be the basis of everything we did, our commitment to each other and Katrina.
In rehearsals and eventually on set, in front of the camera, Emily's performance was brazen and enthralling but above all else, always real. `Barkers' is a complex person herself and her Katrina was dangerous and unstoppable - playfully drawing you in, getting under your skin.
Most importantly Emily humanized Katrina. In the most empathetic way she let us glimpse her vulnerability and pain a couple of times. I am very grateful. This unnervingly playful, violently intense and pleasurable performance often required Emily to reveal and expose herself emotionally. She never once stepped back from that commitment. She would not let Katrina be tamed or intimidated. Whenever I pushed her hard, she kicked back harder and more honestly.
Like Katrina, Emily triumphs most outrageously. We are repelled and attracted at the same time. Her Katrina is more than I had hoped for.
These three young women - Alice, Emily and Katrina - have been an inspiration to me. It's been a wild time thanks to them.
I set out to take some risks, stylistically and emotionally - we all did. There are no cathartic scenes at the end of the film, no redemption for any of the characters. Suburban Mayhem is unsentimental and makes no apologies. We hope we leave you with more questions than answers.
At the beginning, I wanted to tease and taunt, flirt and fuck with you.
In the end, I hope it will intrigue and affect people, provoke and entertain.
- Paul Goldman, Sydney, Australia, March 2006
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Emily Barclay in Suburban Mayhem.
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